Why Bloodline Made Such A Shocking Move With Ozzy, According To John Leguizamo

Released last Friday, Season 3 of Netflix's pulse-pounding drama Bloodline reached its big series finale in a most thrilling fashion, and quite a few unpredictable bombshells dropped on viewers in those last ten episodes. Some of the shocks came specifically because of Netflix's unexpected cancellation announcement, which was a detriment to the storytelling that the three creators had planned. One particular character who suffered the woes of story-minimizing was John Leguizamo's intimidating Ozzy Delveccio, who met a most gruesome fate late in the season. Here's what Leguizamo thought about that scene, and how he helped inform it.

Todd and I really talked about it. He told me I was going to come to an end and I said, 'I understand that.' You still mourn for your character; you created it. But I said, 'I don't want anybody to take my life. If somebody's going to take my life, I'm going to take my own life.' And so Todd and I talked about that, and I just felt that Ozzy would never let anyone take his life from him. If he felt like he was coming to an end, he would do it before they did. That's the kind of pride that he had. So then [Todd] reverse engineered that and started setting up this character so that once I got kicked in the head, which happened to someone in my family --- I don't want to get into it because it's kind of personal --- but they got bullied and beat up so badly that they had brain damage and they changed. I said I think that's what happened, because it was the same kind of beating up with boots and stuff, so they created this [storyline where] --- I got hit in the head and I changed. Ozzy changed.

So many things about that answer are interesting to me, even though Ozzy was such a detestable character in quite a few ways, especially when he was at his most devilishly antagonistic in Season 2. Bloodline's creators -- Todd A. Kessler, Gleen Kessler and Daniel Zelman -- could have easily written Ozzy a simple out in order to focus more on the Rayburns, but they worked with John Leguizamo to create a concluding arc that inspired far more sympathy, curiosity and intrigue than Ozzy earned when he was merely threatening to get John & Co. busted. To the point where his out-of-nowhere death felt like as big a punch of the gut as something happening to one of the central family members.

A lot of that sympathy came from the formerly self-assured Ozzy losing his grip on things after getting throttled by Roy Gilbert's thugs in the early episodes, so it's obviously insightful to learn that someone in John Leguizamo's life was the inspiration for Ozzy's concussive state and mental shift. Because nothing in Bloodline is ever quite spelled out for audiences, Ozzy's own confusion was transferred to fans, and it really wasn't clear if he was seriously injured or just narcissistically confident as he erratically attempted to attain some true form of justice for Danny's death. (Lots of things weren't clear about this season, as we go over in our finale rundown.)

So when his later efforts to meet Roy were thwarted, we weren't exactly ready for Ozzy to shoot himself through the head before the henchman could even put his car in reverse. It was as big a WTF moment as Bloodline brought in Season 3, and I'm almost more uncomfortable now, knowing that his death was a combination of hubris and brain injury.

As one might have expected, Ozzy potentially could have survived a lot longer had Netflix kept Bloodline as part of the lineup. When speaking to THR about this final season, John Leguizamo revealed that Season 3 was supposed to put Ozzy and Eve, Nolan's mother, in focus.

This was supposed to be my season and Andrea Riseborough's. Season 3 was supposed to be our season, but now that you have to close the show, you have to take care of the family throughline that you started.

Ozzy's efforts eventually went unfulfilled in Bloodline's current state, where Eric is basically just going to rot in jail because nothing good comes to Danny and his friends, but it's eye-opening to learn that Ozzy and Eve's story would have really opened up in the story's original form. Which means we never would have gotten to see that incredibly uncomfortable scene at the church where Ozzy is demanding to talk to a priest who never worked there. It's a shame, to be sure, but Leguizamo has certainly made the character's present existence all the more interesting with his reveals.

All 3 seasons of Bloodline are available to stream on Netflix. After finding out what the co-creator said about that very last scene, find out what else is coming to the streaming service this year, check out our 2017 Netflix calendar, and then head to our summer TV schedule to see when everything is premiering in the coming months.

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